Give your rom-com a soundtrack: love songs from the people I love.
I indulged my love of love by asking the closest people in my life for their favorite love songs. Here’s a collection for the hopeless romantic.
artwork by Meghan Howson.
In the least cliché way possible, I am in love with love songs. As a tried and true hopeless romantic, there is very little that I hold dearer to my heart than a confession of love, especially in the form of music. Personally, my guilty pleasure is love songs that cause me an exorbitant amount of emotional pain, either in their melancholic relatability, their general sound, or in a sort of jealous yearning–what must it be like to feel love so deeply that there is simply nothing to be done save replicating it through music?
Love songs are the most versatile form of confessing emotion, for there is no true “correct” definition of what feeling it should evoke, or what it should intend; love can be uplifting and devastating, joyous and tragic, calm and chaotic. A love song is its own form of intimacy, of familiarity both real and manufactured; it is the sonic form of memorizing every feature on a person’s face, the tone of their laugh, the lilt of their voice and the gestures they make as they tell a story. So in the search for my favorites, I struggled to narrow down what I was actually looking for. I knew only that I wanted to feel something, but I couldn’t identify any sort of specificity, so I did what I do best and plied my friends and family with questions.
The fundamental question: What is your favorite love song?
The resulting playlist was among the cheesiest that I have ever put together, but it’s also the only grouping of songs that have ever genuinely brought me to the verge of tears. Their picks spanned genres and sentiments, but I could feel the energy of every person in every pick.
There were certainly some eclectic selections like “Fly Love” by Jamie Foxx on the Rio soundtrack, and classics like “Fly Me to the Moon” by Frank Sinatra and “Someone Like You” by Van Morrison, but my favorites were the ones that I had never heard. I got to listen to these songs for the first time from the perspective of knowing that someone felt strongly enough to tell me about it as the song that feels the most like the embodiment of love, sorrowful or blissful. After reviewing the whopping 57 songs that I received—nobody could pick just one—I found that they fell into (roughly) six categories, depending on what you’re looking for, regardless of your relationship status.
The “Melancholy/Extreme Yearning” songs are the epitome of heartache. They are loves lost or never had, waiting for a confession, a hint, or even a slight acknowledgement. They are the fear of heartbreak or rejection, fear of taking a chance, and fear of never knowing love at all. They feel like wading through cold water and trying not to be carried away by the current. They essentially evoke the image of someone staring longingly out a window on a rainy day during a rom com third act break up. Reenact at your own discretion.
Next is “Revelatory Love,” which includes songs that feel like a divine realization. They are waking up and realizing that the right person is here, suddenly or having been there all along (while not included in the list, very “You Belong With Me”-esque) and that life wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be the same without them. They feel like basking in sunshine. Life doesn’t quite feel real, this love doesn’t quite feel deserved or even possible, but its warmth sinks and takes hold, a spread so slow you don’t notice until you start to burn a little.
The songs in “Peaceful/Relieving Love” feel like a safe haven. They feel like coming home to a person whose very presence sets you at ease, a sign of relief in human form. Love is a comfort, a simple pleasure of life, a level of familiarity and intimacy that feels second-nature. It is knowing and being known without a shred of apprehension or fear. There’s comfort that settles deep in bones, a soft, easy breeze, a rustling of leaves, an eternal calm.
“Exciting/Early Stages” love songs feel like the giddiness and nervousness of a new relationship. Embarrassed giggles, crushes’ names whispered between friends, finding meaning in every passing glance, every fleeting touch. It is butterflies and initial attraction, unsure of feelings in others and in self, electricity flowing through veins. It’s wanting to be so much more intense than acceptable for the stage, scrambling for any minute spent together.
“Joyful Love” encompasses the ideal love, an excitement that goes beyond just crushing, that goes deeper than butterflies. It’s the desire to jump up and down and dance for lack of any other possible expression of feelings. It is almost youthful in its delight, but is tied to a contentment of knowing that this love will always be enough.
Ambiguous songs were those that I didn’t quite know what to do with. They were at times a delight and others utterly devastating. They toe the line between melancholy and romanticization, questioning whether the longing is hopeful and rife with potential, or destined for heartbreak. Their effect truly depends on your mental state and what you wish to read into the lyrics and/or the sound of the music itself. Can a peppy beat cover up lyrics that do nothing but yearn? Do slow, moving instrumentals offset a joyous tune? Perhaps it depends on whether the listener is in love.
So, really, what is a love song? A love song bleeds with emotion, and cuts to the core of raw humanity, happy or sad. It ties stomachs into knots that slip loose into butterflies, etches words into souls and settles rhythms into veins, shreds hearts into pieces and lays them out to be ogled at, marries for fifty years and places flowers at graves. My biggest takeaway from essentially baring the souls of those closest to me was that love songs develop meaning as they become associated with another person. Love songs span lifetimes and transcend definition. They teach those of us who have never been in love its infinite capacity, and that romantic love is not their only application.
Check out all the songs that made the cut:
Melancholy Love/Extreme Yearning
Faye Webster – “A Dream With a Baseball Player”
boygenius – “We’re In Love”
Zella Day – “Only a Dream”
Sarah Kinsley – “Sliver of Time”
Slaughter Beach, Dog – “104 Degrees”
U2 – “All I Want Is You”
Cole Porter – “So In Love”
Tracy Chapman – “For You”
Indigo Girls – “Love Will Come to You”
Leanna Firestone – “Two Week Notice”
Mazzy Star – “Fade Into You”
Joyful Love
Victoria Monét – “Coastin’”
Frank Sinatra – “Fly Me to the Moon”
Harry Styles – “Adore You”
Pink Pantheress – “Nice to Meet You (feat. Central Cee)”
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrel – “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”
Chappell Roan – “Red Wine Supernova”
Van Morrison – “Sweet Thing”
Silk Sonic – “Skate”
Peaceful/Relieving Love
Rosie Thomas – “Since You’ve Been Around”
Van Morrison – “Someone Like You”
Jamie Foxx – “Fly Love”
SZA – “Snooze”
Taylor Swift – “Invisible String”
Etta James – “A Sunday Kind of Love”
Lana Del Rey – “Margaret (feat. Bleachers)”
Taylor Swift – “State of Grace (Acoustic Version) [Taylor’s Version]”
English Chamber Orchestra – “Marianelli: Mrs Darcy (From “Pride and Prejudice” Soundtrack)”
Eric Clapton – “Wonderful Tonight”
Indigo Girls – “Power of Two”
Hozier – “Cherry Wine”
Jon Batiste – “The Very Thought of You”
Revelatory Love
Hozier – “To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”
Hozier – “Sunlight”
Leanna Firestone – “Strawberry Mentos”
Blossom Dearie – “It Amazes Me”
Leon Bridges – “Beyond”
Hozier – “I, Carrion (Icarian)”
Exciting Love/Early Stages/Crush
Beatles – “I’ve Just Seen a Face”
Steve Lacy – “Give You the World”
Selena – “Dreaming of You”
The Internet – “Hold On”
Kali Uchis – “Endlessly”
ALEMEDA – “Gonna Bleach My Eyebrows”
Sixpence None the Richer – “Kiss Me”
Silk Sonic – “Leave the Door Open”
Ambiguous (Some Repeats)
Mitski – “My Love Mine All Mine”
Justin Hurwitz – “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme”
Fleetwood Mac – “Songbird”
Taylor Swift – “The Way I Loved You”
Etta James – “A Sunday Kind of Love”
ALEMEDA – “Gonna Bleach My Eyebrows”
edited by Eva Smolen.
artwork by Meghan Howson.